Blowing Bubbles

Not every memory is worthy of rescue
Each an iridescent bubble,
Bobbled on the breeze of time
Landing gently on a finger tip
A nostalgic prismatic sphere
caressed by spires of starlight
but no hero is so sweet
as to save every memory.
No memory so worthy
That it will not at some point
Release its contents
With a muted pop…
So, when our dreams are just too tired to come true,
We have to wake up
And start blowing some more bubbles.

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Essay: Love is an ever unfolding friendship.

Love is an ever unfolding friendship:  Consumed the by the most poignant and desirous lessons of love, we speak of endless unfolding as we wrap around each other in this inextricable embrace.  Falling in love is not the closing of doors or a narrowing of path, but a tremendous expansion.  I think we experience love both as individuals, and in the mysterious blend of “oneness.”

Thirsty, but afraid to drink:  We are intoxicated  by the other’s outpouring of words – a cathartic release of those thoughts and remembrances that comprise the fear and apprehension of our past.  Strange that as we release our fears and open ourselves to possibility, it is another fear that tries to fill the open space.  What is brilliant is that we know this – and somehow, find comfort with its shared awareness.  I like sometimes being unable to question expression before it springs forth; it’s good to know that some things come naturally.   Even with the euphoric effects of love, we are sobered by the immenseness of discovery.

Impetuous romancers.  Many of us must seem so misguided to those that would prefer we be on their path; and that is the irony.  The guidance of others is, indeed, someone else’s guidance!  We want “us” tremendously – and as lovers, each should choose this – and so with every “I love you so” they push open a gate even wider for the other; each also open to the possibilities left by both certainty and doubt.

Cool, Sad, Odd, Choices:  A life chosen alone, cannot be experienced together.  But cool that choices made together, can be experienced alone.  Sad that we are sometimes afraid to believe in gifts presented through spirit.  And even more odd that our individual choices can seem small and alone without the company of pragmatism; the logical and not-so-independent guidance and views of others.  Our choices are our paths; they have run up along side each other.  They blend, overlap, weave, and as indistinguishable as they are at times, I still believe there are three; “yours, mine, ours.”  There is also, “theirs.”

Undeserved explorers.  Knee to knee we huddle and kiss and breath each other at a wobbly café table, stabilized at the base by sugar packets – clairvoyants asking questions not because we don’t know the answers, but because we love to hear the other say it.  We asked what is it we want in life with, for, from another.  “Here, let me help you with that answer,” like sharing succulent morsels from a tour de force presented on bone china, garnished with delicious accessories…soulful stares, caressing touch, flowing features.  We speak of that which we have together until we are no longer deserved. Love and fear are race companions, running out in front of the other – trading the lead position on the journey of discovery.  Our lives, our love, are like sugar packets; shims of stability in an unfolding world that never stops being explored.

The paradox of gradual emergence and submergence.  It is confusing to face where we are with each other, because we are forever coming from the past, and it is that to which we find reference and relativity.  This washes up against a future that rides in on a steed of words penned and spoken from the heart.

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In the Littoral Zone

Precious chance for a lonely thought,
Loose, slip-fades sinuously free
A melodious stream of nostalgic mist
Off an Arabica sea.
 
Curiously exhaled from dissonance
In an amber lit café.
He imagines himself a sojourner,
A wayfarer without a way.
 
Long shore drift en echelon
Long minutes march by metronome
Long is the spellbound beachcomber
For an island all his own.
 
Long is the dream of an inland man
Lost to his seaside girl.
Diver down where the standard waves
Swimming dizzy for a polished pearl
 
Light from her eyes plays on sea glass chips
Tumbled in the curling waves
That crest and break on a beach that waits
for a wish he once had made.
 
The surf is heard like a lingering kiss
breathing ripples on the smoothening sand
And just as the whisper and simmering fades,
Another promise swells, tumbles, and lands.
 
The ocean is love running breathless,
In a race between the moon and the sun,
Causing tides to surge across the poignant curve
Of an incandescent blue horizon
 
A tranquil star contracts and bursts
In pulsing neon spires
There’s forever a star expiring
While life glows like embers in the fire.
 
If this writer could paint, it would be a portrait
of the empty space next to him.
Awaiting the image of a seagoing girl
Dancing waves on a canvas of ocean.

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Perth, Australia

I pressed firmly into my seat, as the massive jet slipped gravity.  At 300 kilometers per hour, the runway in Melbourne fell away, music already in my ears, companionless as usual.  We banked hard to the west, rising above the smoke of widespread wildfires, breaking through into cascades of sunlight drenching flowers of billowy clouds.  I have no expectations – I’ve landed in LA, San Diego, San Francisco dozens of times – this was just Western Australia. Perth.

I inspected the Australian skies through the jet window – imaging your companionship.  And when we landed and disembarked, I could almost sense your anticipation and figure moving behind me – I turned out of the jet way, and you overtook me like a wave making a break for the beach.  Awakened and anxious to get out into the streets, I became thirsty, but no drink would quench it.

The breezes eddied behind passing cars, stirring some fallen eucalyptus leaves that softened under my soles.  Limbs of willow trees, wagged and formed breathing shadows of you in my path.  I can smell your hair and the perfume lingering on your shoulders, but I can’t see you.

One ticket to Fremantle – a few steps off the platform, I’m sitting on fiberglass seats staring out a thick plastic window – with little stress fissures in it that channel the sunlight into scintillating whiskers; the train lurches and we are off to the port city, Freo.  I imagine our hands touching, grasping the steel pole as we sway through turns in the track.  I smile secretly with closed lips, and close my eyes – lifting my head to feel the kiss of my companion.

I reach for you as we enter a maze of open streets – and you slip through my fingers.  I’m disappearing into passages between colonial buildings, coming out onto terraced patios, empty handed but filled with a vision of red, and white, and yellow peonies in dashed rows of tidy flower boxes.  Before me is a single drink on a black wrought iron table, glistening beads rolling down uncontrollably as the seaside air condenses on the cold glass.  I imagine your soft visage and mane, softly quivering in a breeze amidst alfresco cafés.

The bustling marketplace is filled with new faces and lively music and curios and crafts in busy blends of yet unnamed colors.  Faces are moist with a light sweat, smiling – crowds of companions, sparked and animated, with embraced arms and sacks of mutual adored memories in progress.

I turn to my missing companion – a soft face browned by the love of sunlight, lips moist and full of life that move in to fill my mouth with the quenching sensation of hope.  Her identity eludes me, but she drifts freely before my eyes, plays symphonies in my ears, and we sway through time in the exchange of our breaths. Each beautiful epiphany, electric experience, is the same bright star by which we both navigate home to a kiss.

I dreamed of our time together on the flight home to the eastern seaboard.  And when I walked out of the jet way, I was clinging tight to her memory. I was no longer thirsty.  I thought to myself, I only know she is gone, when I cannot turn to her to say hello; and I mostly miss her if she isn’t here to kiss me goodbye.  My companion wasn’t missing – she was waiting.

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Thanksgiving Alone on a Roof

What more could I want?

I have the unchained sounds of the wind brushing through the bare trees.  And the sky just pushes by on their way somewhere south of here.  It’s very quiet except the sounds of the winds and my fingers clicking on the keyboard.  I’m sitting in my jeep parked up against a white wooden fence that delineates the pastures, the 2 acre or so sloped patch of grass that provide the food, flooring, commode, and lint trap for the llamas and goats that live on it.  The slope easily exceeds 25 degrees, and if I were to roll over the fence 4 feet, I’d be looking down into the tree line rather than out over the Catoctins.  I guess route 340 winds out there west through that gap.  Where it’s especially clear tonight, revealing the very distant lights of some West Virginia town I again guess.  Had I a companion with me, this would be an arguable point.  But as I sit alone, no one can contest me.  The owners of the “inn” where I live are gone this evening for Thanksgiving dinner.  The other displaced bachelors that live up here at Raspberry springs are also gone off with family or friends.  So, yes, I am quite alone.  My primary friend within earshot, is the wind.  It doesn’t often shut up when it’s around.  Odd, were it not for the windbreaks offered by trees and structures, it might slide over the ground without a sound.

The air turned quite cool…and the ranks of clouds show the faded orange glow of the sunset.  I fear not turn around and see the full moon hovering somewhere over my right shoulder.  I hear the Brunswick line, probably coming from Martinsburg.

The hills and farms have gone black, all but the window lights and house lamps.  Back in my desert, the ground would have certainly been desolate and … not the worst, worst darkness.

I still see the thick streak of sunset…like a thin window …if I could peak my head over the lower edge of that streak, I’d find this expanse of gold…my whole life past, glazed over, in golden mist.  The Brunswick howls – and my mind wanders in dementia to a dinner table at Thanksgiving.  Yes, it is Thanksgiving tonight and for the first time in my life, I am utterly alone on the side of this hill.  My children are happy and playing with their friends, my wife, soon to be ex, is probably drinking wine and feeling sad.

Me?  I’m just glad for my senses and undying faith and hope, that one day, the sounds of the wind will not remind me of this moment but of something new.  Lord, bless this evening, your day is done, she was a fine one.  Thank you for the unrecognizable shapes of the clouds, and fathomless smears of cool wind that tear up my eyes and fill my nose so that I’m barely….breathing right.  Now sleep comes…damn these short days of your eastern winters.  My desert, my soul mate; only in the most deep and solemn seconds, do we truly recognize each other.

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Walking My Dog “Memory”

Interesting – as everything is coming into the harbor and some things will make it to their slips, others will crash against the rocks, others will just turn around and head back out to sea. Meanwhile, all is adrift. Yesterday I was down – I had just these memories; like an old box of Crayola crayons smeared down to their paper wrapping, I can’t seem to make a picture.

Job change/no confirmation, kids on the cusp of a wave that will take them away from me, what I thought was for keeps is drifting off, my youth giving way to desires to just go home and nap, my wishing I could just talk my way into a stupor but knowing that I don’t want to hurt anyone (even for the most harmless reason). I just want to go home – and to be honest, I have none…

So I get on a jet and I go to Oz and toast with old mates, I’ll hang out in Pattaya and long to call back the mysteries I see; I’ll dream through a jungle in Costa Rica and picture you complaining with a backpack on, I’ll go to Brazil and see my children and a mother I love running through the surf.

I just bought an international phone today – I’m sure the messages from Asia will rain down on my hopes and lost friends in the West. One day, I wonder if I should just not return and find a girl, settle down, marry, have children – but home is forever a horizon for me. I just need someone to slap the living shit out of me – beat me into sub-consciousness, hand me a Corona, kiss me on the forehead and tell me everything is all right now.

Money, ego, longing…Christ. What is this all about! Why is the bitter/sweet more sweet than bitter?
Tonight – laundry, finish the three half empty bottles of wine in my fridge – pray to stay awake long enough for a walk in my neighborhood with my faithful dog Memory, tugging at the leash, just the now and then clacking sound of its drunken footsteps; as the clothes tumble in the dryer.

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Lines in the Sand

Sleepy words awaken
Like a stirred morning child,
Wincing through lashes at clarity
Betwixt dreams and noises outside.
 
They skip through their days
Slipping from grasp
Of convention, imagination,
Institution, alas
 
Like clay, paper, and notes
They become idle matter for craft
Until love cast the canvas
The artists, at last
 
As sketches and phrases
Lift illusion from pages
They carve blocks of hope,
Soulful forms, tall and ageless
 
Loves art, once feared
Had slipped through their hands
Appears simple and golden
Soft lines in the Sand

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Strange Numb World

Like a once broken promise, she came to me
Out of my past, across forever seas
casting her truth into the furrows of dreams
Sewing intimate seeds that hushed the screams
 
And unsolved riddles of throttling fear
That one day next, hope would not get here
Over rolling swells, far from land
Spices and driftwood and contraband
 
Like caramel drippings from a Dali sun
Her eyes cast the color on taught sails of muslin
She sweetly falls soft through scents and caresses
Like a settling snowflake on winters dried branches
 
She is more than a feeling, brighter than sight
She is the stir in the morning to my withering night
And I recall her breath, a fathomless deep
landing home in the heart, from a precipitous leap.
 
But the bitter serenity when out of my sight
Is her touch to my soul like raw senses at night
I spiral away, she’ll not get here in time
To keep me from falling deeper in mind.
 
In this strange numb world, it’s just her and me
Afloat on the tears, of wounded poetry.

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Seasoning

If silence and solitude were to have weight
they’d account for these hills, held fast in place.
Which draw a chill from this glaucous sky,
into fleeting cold winds, pulling tears from my eyes.

Chimney smoke mingles above the roof tops,
and can be smelled across empty playground lots.
A stolid chill dons a winters dusk shroud,
as the sun slips away behind dull distant clouds.

As they stew over secret recipes
These families are conjuring remedies
which season more deeply in winters love
so thicker runs the courses of blood.

Bare tree limbs reach up as dead hands on a clock.
Near a merry-go-round, hunkered down like bedrock.
Ruts from the rails of a Radio Flyer
Trail a lone child’s footprints, both frozen in mire.

As I shiver alone in my questioning state
Unsecured and open swings a gait.
From unseen origins they fall from the sky,
these snowflakes that soften with tears in my eyes.

I’m not sure if ever, or otherwise when
our journeys will deliver us convergent friends.
But the lessons we harvest from each seasons end
Make for savory spices when the next one begins.

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Boat Called Rock Bottom

Why would anyone set sail on a boat called “Rock Bottom”
Yet here I am…
The sky winked a few times
the day spilled slowly and steadily out over the horizon.
Millions of people cursed it, loved it,
or wished it had never come.
But, with no heed to us,
the day crossed the finish line tired and worn,
collapsing into the arms of dusk.

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